The concept of evil in William Lane Craig

Document Type : Academic research papers

Author

Department of Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Girls, Ain Shams University

Abstract

In this paper, we discussed the position of the philosopher William Lane Craig on the concept of evil. Craig sees that the problem of evil is one of the biggest obstacles that stand in the way of belief in the existence of God. Through his philosophy, he tried to respond to the skeptics about the existence of God by responding to many philosophical concepts that atheists deal with to strengthen their doctrine in denying the existence of God, especially with regard to the problem of evil. To prepare a clear and explicit response against atheism to the possibility of the existence of both God and evil together, so Craig divided evil into first: an intellectual problem: it is divided into two problems, an internal problem and an external problem, and the internal problem was divided into two views, namelyA- A logical view of evil: It represents the traditional form of the atheistic objection to the problem of evil in general since Epicurus, which states that the existence of evil in the world is incompatible with the existence of God.
B: A probabilistic view of evil: it centers on the contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evil. Atheists see that the existence of God with evil is logically possible, but it is improbable.

Keywords